We are excited to announce that starting today, the AWS Free Usage Tier will include Amazon RDS instances. With this announcement, customers can gain hands-on-experience with Amazon RDS at no-cost. Customers eligible for the AWS Free Usage tier can now use up to 750 hours per month of a single-AZ t1.micro DB instance, along with 20 GB of database storage capacity and 10 million IO requests per month. The free tier applies to Single-AZ deployments of MySQL, Oracle “Bring-Your-Own-License (BYOL)” licensing model and SQL Server Express Edition.

The expanded Free Usage Tier with Amazon RDS t1.micro instances is available today in all regions, except for AWS GovCloud. For more information about the AWS Free Usage Tier, please visit the AWS Free Usage Tier page. To get started using Amazon RDS, visit the Amazon RDS detail page.